Storms: Guess who will pay 'whatever it costs'

Storms: Guess who will pay 'whatever it costs'
Saul Friedman
Family & Relationships


October 22, 2005

A reader's letter to one of our sister newspapers, The Baltimore Sun, noted that President George W. Bush is sharply raising the national debt ceiling to help pay the costs of the Gulf Coast disasters. "It's time to realize that the president intends to create so much debt that merely paying the interest will make it impossible to support programs such as Medicare and Social Security," the reader said.

Actually, much of Medicare is paid for by beneficiary premiums and co-payments. Furthermore, Social Security, which is in surplus and not part of the budget, is supported by worker and employer contributions.

Yet the reader has a point, for the White House has hinted both programs may have to help pay for the hurricanes. And conservative Republicans are up to one of their old tricks, using a deficit they helped create as an excuse to cut social programs they never liked.

That technique was used during President Ronald Reagan's first term, when his record tax cut put the budget in a hole, deepened by record military spending. But Reagan was not disturbed, and his brilliant budget director, David Stockman, explained why.

In a 1981 Atlantic Monthly article by William Greider, then a Washington Post editor, Stockman confessed that the budget process and his rosy, supply-side scenarios were phony and that he knew it at the time. But Democrats had joined Republicans, Stockman said, like "hogs" at the trough, in doling out outrageous tax breaks. Faced with the growing deficit, defensive Democrats reluctantly joined gleeful Republicans in cutting popular programs.

The deficit, as Stockman had planned, was a Trojan Horse brought into the budget process to force the cuts.

Fast forward to George W. Bush, whose $331 billion deficit this year will grow to $500 billion in coming years. While the national debt is approaching $8 trillion, Bush says he'll spend "whatever it costs" to help the Gulf Coast recover. But "whatever it costs" does not mean new taxes, he vowed. Rather, he said, "we have to make sure we cut unnecessary spending."

In response, about 100 of the most conservative Republicans in Congress, members of the Republican Study Committee, suddenly worried about the deficit they helped create with huge tax cuts, proposed "Operation Offset," a wish list of cuts they described as "tough choices in tough times." Tough for the poor, disabled and elderly.

These government-hating lawmakers who can retire with good pensions and taxpayer-supported health coverage, proposed to delay the Medicare drug benefit for a year to save $30.8 billion, and further cut the allocation by $70billion over five years by increasing premiums and co-payments, even for the sickest beneficiaries who qualify for home health care. And they proposed to cut spending on Medicaid - health care for the poorest, disabled and older Americans - by $60 billion over those five years, partly through higher fees.

Even more serious was the Republicans' adoption of the agendas of the right-wing Heritage Foundation, the farther-out Cato Institute and that of Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, whose primary purpose, he says, is to get the federal government "down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub."

Toward that end, over the next five years, the study committee would eliminate $4 billion in loans to graduate students; cut the global AIDS initiative by $3 billion; eliminate the Corporation for Public Broadcasting ($2 billion) as well as the National Endowment for the Arts ($678 million) and the National Endowment for the Humanities ($769 million); eliminate the National Science Foundation Math and Science Program ($973 million); cancel NASA's new moon and Mars initiative ($11 billion); and cut the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's funding by $10 billion.

Did I mention the cuts in weapons programs? There were none.

A miserly 2 percent across-the-board cut in military spending could wring $10billion from the Pentagon in one year.

Nor was there even a hint that the United States could stop throwing good money after the $200 billion already spent to establish justice and ensure domestic tranquillity in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Iraq war is expected to cost $60 billion this year.

But such cuts are not part of the right-wing dream of crippling the federal government by eliminating hundreds of services, small and large, that enable the United States to be a civilized society and a good world citizen, fulfilling its constitutional mission "to establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense [and] promote the general welfare." Yet, if it's the deficit these right-wingers are really worried about, The Washington Post's E. J. Dionne Jr. points out that "the cost this year alone of the Bush tax cuts enacted in 2001 and 2003 comes to $225 billion ... which would more than pay the costs of Katrina recovery." Continuing those cuts, which mostly benefited the wealthiest 1 percent of taxpayers, will cost $250billion a year over the next five years.

The White House has so far rejected calls for a delay in the Medicare prescription drug benefit; too many drug and insurance companies are counting on it. But the move has the support of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who would repeal the bill, and the Heritage Foundation, which says the program should be scaled back to serve only poor seniors without insurance.

The president has endorsed some cuts, but so far he has not said who will pay "whatever it costs."

I'll give you one guess. As White House Counselor Dan Bartlett has suggested, the Social Security surplus, along with Medicare and Medicaid, may yet become orphans of the storms.

WRITE TO Saul Friedman, Newsday, 235 Pinelawn Rd., Melville, NY, 11747-4250, or by e-mail at saulfriedman@comcast.net.
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